New York Film Festival 2022

[Chris Knipp]

60th New York Film Festival 2022

SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 16, 2022

FESTIVAL COVERAGE THREAD


ADAM DRIVER IN WHITE NOISE

The NYFF doesn't give awards, but its 'Main Slate' of 25-30 films, the main focus, is a little like Cannes' Competition films. The Main Slate so far as of Aug. 8, consists only of: Opening Night film, Noah Baumbach's Don DeLillo adaptation White Noise, Centerpiece Film, Laura Poitras' Nan Goldin and Sackler family documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, closing Night feature Elegance Bratton's autobiographical film about Marine basic The Inspection, and the 60th Anniversary event, James Gray's autobiographical Armageddon Time.

Opening Night Film: White Noise (Noah Baumbach). The NYFF has nodded to Netflix dominance but for the work of Noah Baumbach, a native son of NYC (Park Slope, Brooklyn) whose first film The Squid and the Whale debuted at my first NYFF in 2005. White Noise will have its North American premiere at Alice Tully Hall Sept. 30, 2022. It's an adaptation of Don DeLillo's 1985 "epochal postmodern" (says the PR release) novel "long perceived as unfilmable." Baumbach captures the essence of DeLillo’s cacophonous pop-philosophical nightmare on unbounded consumerism, ecological catastrophe, and the American obsession with death. With Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig for this "tightrope walk of comedy and horror."

Centerpiece Film: The Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras). It's an interweaving of two narratives, a documentary exposé of the Sackler family pharmaceutical dynasty, its responsibility for the opioid epidemic and its downfall, and the life of "No Wave" and later major mainstream photographer and representative of an era Nan Goldin, who became involved in holding the Sacklers to account. This will include Goldin's own period of opioid addiction.

Closing Night Film: The Inspection (Elegance Bratton), Oct. 14 at Alice Tully Hall. Bratton is known as a black gay documentarian (Pier Kids, Viceland series "My House," film about underground ballroom dancing competitions) who has made an autobiographical feature starring Jeremy Pope as a gay black man entering basic training in the Marines after a decade on the street, with Bokeem Woodbine as the sadistic sergeant, Raúl Castillo as the sympathetic superior, Gabrielle Union as the cold mother.

Anniversary event: Armageddon Time (James Gray) will be shown at venues at all five boroughs of New York City to celebrate the festival's 60th anniversary. A Cannes hit, Gray's film, another NYC-centric one, features Banks Repeta as Paul Graff, a sixth grader in Queens dreaming of becoming an artist who is friends with Johnny (Jaylin Webb), "mercilessly targeted by their racist teacher") and at odds with his parents (Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway), who strive for financial success to achieve assimilation as Jewish Americans, with his strongest support from his mellow granddad (Anthony Hopkins). Shot on film by Darius Khondji.


JEREMY POPE IN THE INSPECTION